Block Copy Coders

Still no sign of the cat. I’ve phoned all of the local vets and checked the places he would have turned up if he’d been hit by a car but still no luck yet. I’ll hand out some more leaflets to the houses in the road behind ours today.

It’s been interesting listening to other people’s stories of their cat’s going missing, just about all of the cat owners I’ve talked to have had a moggy go missing for around a week only to have them reappear looking a bit de-draggled and very hungry. Apparently it’s not unusual for their curious nature leading to them getting trapped in a shed or an outhouse. Cats can last for up to 12 days without water or food unlike the measly 3 days humans can go. So fingers crossed still though the idea of him stuck somewhere is really horrible.

There were still some minor financial niggles to sort out with Jo over the split of equity in the house which look like they are now settled, I just need to send a letter to our solicitor. That not being sorted out could have lost our current buyer for the house and I wasn’t keen to make an offer on a new house until I was certain the sale of the current one would go through. So I’ve made an offer on another house in Southampton that both me and Suzey like very much and it’s been accepted. The vendors still have to find a place to move to themselves so we’ll be living in Suzey’s flat from the 18th. Even so it feels like yesterday was a significant step towards us both being in the house we love.

Quite hectic since the last update.

Top story is that I’ve now actually asked Suze to be my wife Yes, yes it’s an arse about face way to go about it. In fact we booked the venue for the wedding before telling anyone else we’d decided to wed. Something I really value about our relationship is that it’s a real partnership and extremely even handed. Deciding to get married came out of a late night conversation a few months ago where it was immediately apparent that this was a step we both felt we wanted and needed to take. And then we booked the wedding.

Even so we wanted to make a slight nod to tradition and after receiving the very generous gift of a beautiful Edwardian diamond ring from my mother (pictured below) I went down on one knee last night. And she said yes. Which I was kind of expecting but was still very nice to hear.

In other news, the house we were buying in Southampton has fallen through, the long and short of it is we were gazzumped. We’re still going ahead with the sale of this place and we now have a moving date of 17th July. In the meantime we’ll both live in Suze’s flat and continue the search for a new home. Saw a couple last night and both were really nice. I was a bit worried that there wouldn’t be anything nice on the market and we’d have to settle for what we can get rather than what we’d like. Bit more chipper about the whole thing now it’s clear there’s still some great houses out there and we’ll definitely be able to find something great.

Had an awesome time the weekend just gone with a bit of an impromptu party last Friday. Gareth and Kirsty visited from Dundee and the usual pun and post pub hi-jinks ensued. Was also great to see K’s mates from Soton. It lasted all the way through until 10am the next day and some pictures can be found here

Despite being very much the worst for wear me, Suze, K and Kirsty popped over to Guy and Dom’s for a great evening stuffing ourselves with good wines and various items racletted and grilled courtesy of George Forman and his mighty grilling machine An absolutely top evening, really have to re-arrange my world a little so they happen a lot more often

And last, but certainly not least, had a fantastic time the previous weekend and the Wedgewood Rooms watching Jon and his band storming a win of the Emergenza battle of the bands regional finals. Top work guys They played a blinding set full of rambunctious energy and really suited a big stage. It’s the UK finals next and funnily enough my mate Skweek’s friend’s band is also going to be there. Should be fun.

Phew!

And finally if:

• You’re looking for text editor
• You’re using mac

I can heartily reccomend Textmate, it’s the best editor I’ve used since Brief and can be found here.

It’s been an absolute god send for the current project I’ve been working on (MotoGP X360 Korean and Japanese localizations) as it’s handling of UTF8 / UTF16 has been absolute god send for messing about with the far east character sets. I did the EFIGS localization work for ATV PSP using BBEdit using ISO Latin 1 encoding and it was a bit of mare even though it’s a lot simpler to handle that UTF coupled with unicode. I’m really glad I stumbled onto this in time for Moto GP

And it has a blogging module that let me write and publish this post. It even managed to ween Kor off of filthy emacs

Phew!

Hectic but nice weekend, the majority of which was spent celebrating Jon’s birthday. Got a few pics from Friday night that can be found here though Saturday morning would be a better description for when most of them were taken. Me and Suze didn’t manage to get home until 5am.

Saturday wasn’t quite as late ending but ace fun nether the less which included wandering uninvited into a student house party on the way home. Everyone was really nice and made us feel very welcome indeed. I did get a few pics with Suze’s little camera which hopefully I should be able to get up soon.